Daniel Dräxler

* 1973

  • "Otherwise, I'm quite interested in that when you were talking about this past tense, whether something came up that put you in the direction of some agnosticism or maybe even atheism. Well, it's more like the agnosticism I would say, and when I left that university, in 2003, so in 2004, when we joined the European Union, so Adra Slovakia, they were looking for someone to run a foreign projects. And since I had been in Romania for a short time before and I already spoke english anyway, and in a simple way I manifested myself in such a way that internationally, they asked me if I would be interested in running foreign projects. So in 2004 I started working as a project coordinator for this civic association Adra. Until then, it only had volunteer activities in Slovakia and we actually started when Slovak Ate was established and the official program of Slovak development aid was then covered by U.N.B.T trastand, so we started doing projects. I handed over and implemented the first project in 2005, in Mongolia. As a project for education… In Mongolia? In Mongolia, for the education of the deaf and blind, yes. There was even a deaf teacher and actor, Jožko Rigo, with me for two months. I don't know if you know him, but he also played in the Milan Sládek Theater, as well as in some musicals. So it is a relatively well-known deaf person. So, so the projects started, I was the project coordinator for four years, then I was elected the director of the organization, so I actually worked there for eight years and perhaps paradoxically those factors, quite intensive travel around the world, meeting with other cultures, with other , with a different surrounding, with different opinions, and that's one thing, and the other thing is ... being in a leadership position in the church structure so it allowed me to look behind the scenes, well. Enough, paradoxically, it diverted me from the whole system, so, those internal eight years in that Adra contributed to my gradual reassessment of my own, maybe some of those religious views, and so on. The fact that my father died in 2010 certainly contributed to this. This was actually my biggest trauma I've ever experienced, because even though he was eighty-one years old, so everyone said it was a beautiful age, a beautiful age, so it was irrelevant to me because my father died, so I didn't fight for It looked over that it was a beautiful age, so, so for another three years I actually dreamed of it and I woke all of a sweat. So it was quite challenging for me. And in such circumstances, one with the other and maybe even the completion of that forty, the crisis of middle age, well. So, I gradually left these, these religious spheres. ”

  • "Well then, then after the revolution, again ... so now we are approaching the subject of Hungary again, basically because, because the nationalism was not some anti-Hungarian, which broke out very soon after the revolution, but there, already the nationalism appeared there and then, then, then the Hungarian card was very strong later, so how did you perceive this, that is, in the context of your parents and yourself? Yes. Well, I've always been so inclined ... as I said at the beginning that nationalism ... it's annoying to me in every form. And so I always tried to get that helicopter look, the view, over the thing. And as a young boy in the 1990s, I argued that political parties should not be based on nationality or religion or belief. This means that I already said at the time that the KDH also bothered me that it simply did not belong ... that religion simply did not belong to politics, and I also claimed that the national question did not belong to modern politics, that neither Slovak or Hungarian, none, well so that's how I perceived it and, and maybe what I experienced or what my family somehow experienced, so. There I skipped maybe some more things ... some grandfather who was Slovak had to… Tell me, tell me. It will be inserted into that, into that historical part. Well. So, actually, the grandfather, who was from my mother's side, who was from Bardejov, was called Ján Huščák. So, of course, he had the classic story of how he had to learn Hungarian as a child, yes - so he was forced to speak hungarian in primary school, even though he was a Slovak from Bardejov and then during, during the occupation, during World War II. , when he wanted to stay in Košice with his family… We know that Košice belonged to Hungary during the war, so he simply got the choice that whether he wants to be enlisted and wants to go to the front or whether he wants to stay in the position of military judge, but on the hungarian side. So he basically worked for the Hungarian side in Košice, as a military judge and he was in great trauma, he talked about it when he was ninety years old. Of course, the communists disciplined him in the 1950s and sent him somewhere. Just before Subcarpathian Russia managed to secede, I do not know exactly what year it happened, so he still managed to be detached in Uzhgorod as a punishment, so. So there were a lot of those wrongs and, and that is why when you ask me how I perceived it, I always perceived it negatively when someone drew a national card, whatever, one way or another. When you say that I would… Now maybe as such a detailist, but when you say that this topic should not be raised, it means, for example, that even MOST, which was actually the party that should unite, which connected Hungarian and Slovak intellectuals, whether or not it was in your opinion... Not. Things are not black and white, of course. That project was good, yes ... that project was good, just because he didn't even have national parties, he didn't have it, it's a hungarian party or not, so that MOST as a principle is fine and joining was definitely a good idea . ”

  • "Both my parents had a native language of Hungarian. My mother comes from Košice, from such a bourgeois, classic, Košice family, and my father came from southern Slovakia, from Polipie also from a Hungarian-speaking family, but rather, rather from such a rural one. So there was, there was also such a moment that it actually met ... the bourgeois hungary met the rural hungary. There were some interesting differences, observable. Both parents had a native language of Hungarian, but we are at home - that is, at home with me, my older brother and me, they only spoke slovak, so my native language is already Slovak. They led you to it ... they didn't lead you to it? They did not lead us to Hungarian at all. Hungarian had a form at home, a kind of ... position, a position of some kind of adult language, partly secret maybe, well, when the parents were talking something to each other, which we should not hear, they used Hungarian. And ... but it's interesting that basically we were exposed to the Hungarian language all our childhood, but because our parents didn't talk to us, we didn't really learn it as a child, yes. But parents watched Hungarian television, they listened to Hungarian radio ... Petofi radio, Košút radio, it ran at home. And so it got in my ear, in my ear. While my classmates said that Jesus... hungarian, I don't know what, for me, hungarian was the music of my childhood. It was something very pleasant, which to this day, when I listen to such hungarian or watch a hungarian show somewhere, it evokes those nostalgic feelings in me. So this was my childhood. And so a little stuck to us with my brother from my childhood in Hungarian, but partly little, and it was then more a question of a conscious decision then at puberty that I want to learn that hungarian. And so I started to try a little harder and I'll get to that, I'll come to that later after I went to Hungary for the holidays with my aunt and cousin and there I was showelled into the water because they only knew hungarian. So, that's probably where I learned the most. "

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    Bratislava, 28.02.2021

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„I‘m just such a citizen of all the world, so I speak the seven languages ​​quite actively and every nationalism seems at least ridiculous and embarrassing to me.“

Daniel Dräxler was born in 1973 in Bratislava, into a hungarian-speaking family. At the time of his birth, his parents were relatively older. Both parents were born in Košice, although the paradox is that in different countries, because Košice belonged to Hungary for some time. His mother, as single Huščáková, grew up in a classic burgher family, unlike his father, who came from southern Polipie, from a village surrounding. A very interesting decision of the memorial parents was that despite the fact that they could lead their children to the hungarian language, they basically spoke slovak with them at home. The decision to learn his parents‘ language at a better level came at puberty. He came to it by himself, and this was mainly due to the holidays which he spent in Hungary with his aunt and cousin, who spoke just only hungarian. Daniel attended the Primary School in Bratislava on Košická street and did not consider himself a very good student. When the time came to choose a secondary school, he chose the Secondary Vocational School of Civil Engineering on Dopravná street in Bratislava. After graduating, his profession was to become a mechanic of heavy current equipment. During his adolescence, Daniel also slightly felt the influence of the regime at that time, because his father was a member of the Communist Party for some time, he did not feel too much negative. They were careful about hungarian language, they did not want to draw unnecessary attention to themselves. As a young boy, Daniel always sought insight and did not agree that political parties should be formed on the basis of nationality or religion. As part of the Hungarian national minority in Slovakia, he emotionally perceives the opinions of both parties, maybe more because he sees his family in them. Daniel‘s life was not exactly according to the former regulations, and after high school he did not immediately follow studying at university, as did his peers. After an unsuccessful attempt to be accepted to the Faculty of Education in Nitra, he married at the age of twenty and three children gradually came. He worked as a guitar teacher at the Lúky House of Culture in Petržalka. In time, he became a religious enthusiast and tried to study at the Evangelical Theological Faculty of Comenius University, Department of Evangelical Theology. In the third grade, due to a number of duties, he left school. He became a great religious enthusiast, also thanks to his work in the organization Adra Slovensko. He later gave up and left the church sphere. He developed agnosticism. Since 2013, he has worked as a logistics at the „Doctors Without Borders“ clinic on a mission in Pakistan. After returning home, he lived for a year in Prague and worked alternately in Jordan or a czech catholic charity, where he again participated in the implementation of projects for the Middle East. Since 2016 he has been working at the English International School in Bratislava as an academic support coordinator. After the break-up of his marriage, he found a partner nineteen years older, with whom he is still to this day. Currently, his hobbies include providing courses in playing the guitar and performing the work of a driver in a taxi service, where he sometimes has the opportunity to practice the hungarian language with customers.